The creative works of October 7

Artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians offer the fruits of our collective experiences

There’s an odd disconnect I keep experiencing as a reporter covering arts and culture in Israel, and that’s the wave of creativity that has swept this country in the weeks and months since October 7.

I noted then that I didn’t receive Whatsapps or emails or any communications about cultural developments for weeks. It was well into November before the first inklings of how artists were responding appeared on social media.

First there was Zeev ‘Shoshke’ Engelmayer, the caricaturist now well known for his Daily Postcards, colorful imagery about those who were killed, the hostages, and continuing today, with posters on bus stops and at protests, exhibits at museums and galleries around the world. Artist Zoya Cherkassky responded quickly as well, with her gut-wrenching oils displaying the images we were all seeing, along with Shabloolim, or Or Yogev, with his graphic prints posted on Instagram.

A recent Engelmayer, this one an imagined image of the six hostages who were murdered, curled up in the Gaza tunnel

And now, nearly one year after that black Shabbat day, it’s an endless onslaught of events and films and TV shows and exhibits and books.

This week alone, I saw several new exhibits at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, marking October 7, including works from the new collection of French collectors Mareva Arthur Essebag, who has been posting incessantly on Instagram since October 7, battling antisemitism and October 7 denials, and asked some 30 Israeli artists to choose a work for him to purchase that relates to what happened that day.

(Essebag is also the producer behind the French commercial aired during primetime showing a Jewish family hiding from antisemitism in their Paris apartment.)

One of the artworks in the Essebag exhibit is by Osnat Ben Dov, a talented photographer whose prints move well beyond a mere image. This work is of a plastic grocery bag of lemons, sitting on a wooden kitchen table. Ben Dov was at the press tour that day, and told me that she had an exhibit at the Be’eri art gallery when the terrorist attack took place, which included burning the gallery.

As she was in touch with the curator of the gallery, Sophie Berzon Mackie, Osnat invited Sophie and her family to come to her house, right then and there, and they did, for two weeks. At some point later on, Osnat came across this bag of lemons, molting slightly, but some surviving and they seemed to represent that sense of survival that was so present then and now.

One of Tal Mazliach's works on the left, and Osnat Ben Dov's molting lemons

The Tel Aviv art museum is also showing the incredibly colorful and potent acrylic works of Tal Mazliach, an artist who lives in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and spent 20 hours in her safe room — normally her studio — with a blanket pulled over her head, incessantly drinking espressos from the machine she kept hidden under the blanket as well.

Her works are small square canvases, because that’s what she could purchase from the local art store near her brother’s house, where she evacuated to, and they show what she went through that day, with tiny mantras written into the canvases about fear and guns and “they’re coming to get me” or “they’re here.” She made it out, but it’s so clear that that day is imprinted on her soul.

I’m thinking about a play I went to, written by my nephew’s partner in which she acted in the main role as well. It was a takeoff on Hamlet, very well-acted, veering toward avant-garde and fringe, and also funny and relevant. But the one line I remember most clearly was said by her co-playwright as she introduced their work, and said, “It’s so painful to make art right now and so necessary.”

Yep, that resonated with me as well.

Or what I heard during the recent Metulla Poetry Festival, held in Jerusalem this year instead of the northern town that borders Lebanon, because the village is unlivable right now. There were four poets, and one was from Kibbutz Be’eri, and he described what conversations are like for them in the last months.

“I’m still in the disaster itself, I can’t write about it yet, maybe in another 20 years,” said Yisrael Neta. “We cry and laugh a lot, we tell stories all the time at Be’eri.”

Just the idea of Be’eri residents sitting around and talking, and laughing, made my heart happy.

There are the films and TV series too, like Kissufim, the name of the one of the kibbutzim that was attacked on October 7, and the title of this new Netflix film that takes viewers back to 1979, and a group of young people living at the kibbutz at the time of the peace treaty signing between Egypt and Israel.

It’s a hopeful movie but a difficult one as well, and it’s unreal to see the scenes of kibbutznikim buying falafel in Gaza, or sitting on the beach alongside Gazans —uneasily, but existing in the same place.

As I interview and speak with all these creative types, the filmmakers and writers and artists and vocalists too, they all echo one another, unknowingly, speaking about their need to create something concrete that relates to the last months. They also need, like the rest of us, to inch forward, hour by hour, day by day, and do so with their tools, their materials and oils and words and cameras.

I, for one, am thankful they’re doing that for us.